I mean they’re not all super rich but especially in the USA and especially with actors or TV personalities it seems like the well known ones make huge amounts of money. Just picking people at random and doing some searching online, apparently Scott Bakula got paid $120,000 for each episode of NCIS: New Orleans he was in which totalled over $18 million. Some sources say that Sarah Sherman, who’s been on SNL for 3 seasons, is worth around $4 million. Why do they get paid huge amounts of money when most people, even if they’re at the top of their industry, make a fraction of that?
Products that scale indefinitely to the masses earn indefinitely scaled pay as well. What’s far grosser is what the studios and their greedy CEOs earn off the backs of production staff who aren’t paid on the same model and are treated like props with no job security.
Most are not.
This is IMO the most awful stuff in these economy,
You have a couple of actors/singers who earn insane amount of money.
Then you have a large chunk who by mixing teaching, local theatre/bars, and some extra, get from a living wage, to a well-paid job.
And finally you have a majority who struggle.
All of that mostly based on being at the right place at the right time, and having the right friends
Can confirm from experience. I’m a freelance performance artist. Typical community shows pay maybe $100-200, festivals can pay $1-2k but are harder to get and fuck you over in other ways. The real money is in corporate gigs and weddings, but those kill your spirit.
Because mass media technology duplicates their work millions and millions of times over. If you think about how many end consumers get the product of their work, it will make more sense.
One reason entertainers actually manage to take home a sizable piece of this enormous pie is that they have strong unions. Important not to forget that. Because millions of wannabes would love to take Bakula’s place for nothing more than a living wage. The way they keep that from happening is good old fashioned labor solidarity and smart bargaining at every level of cast and production. I wish the entire economy were unionized as well as entertainment is. The world would be quite different.
Being an influencer(or entertainer whatever) is like playing an incremental game. If you have 10 million fans and everyone pays you $1 you have 10 million dollars. The money is not about the art, it’s about how many people they can reach.
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Here’s what it comes down to: negotiations based on how much money the industry makes from their work. Because without the artist, comedian, etc., their profits vanish.
Now understand that every worker in the world could realise the same thing. That’s what unions are for, having that weight to give the employees of a company leverage and ask for a bit more of the pie that wouldn’t exist without their work. Why do you think businesses fight unions so damn hard? Because it’s easier to distract or scare enough of a worker group, mostly compared to a single artist.
The people in the arts who make lots of money are the exception, not the rule.
Yeah, do your community and yourself a favour and support local artists
- The entertainment industry is not known to it’s job security, the earnings need to cover downtime as well.
- Agents, artists have agents who get them their jobs, from what I understand they are often paid a percentage of the fee that the artist charge, so not all money goes to the artists pocket. The agent also knows the industry and how much an artist is worth to the productions, if a movie has a famous actor, it can be a huge draw and vastly increase earnings, since the actor is a draw, they should be compensated well.
- When an artist gets well known in the industry, they have many more opportunities, so productions need to pay more to get the artist they want, this means booking a schedule way ahead in the future, blocking that time off from other projects.
- It can be VERY physically demanding to change their appearance from role to role, one role might require the actor to play an overweight character and shortly after that production wraps they may need to play a character in near physical prime.
Note that I am not an actor or artist, I am an IT guy who has little inside knowledge, though this should be a reasonable explanation of what is going on
Firstly it’s a fraction of a percent of the pool of people working as entertainers that get paid anything close to a comfortable salary—many don’t even last a few years and make basically nothing before they change careers.
The successful ones get paid a load basically because the people that invest in funding TV shows & films know that you can generally multiply your investment by attaching a household name to the project. Now this is for several reasons, firstly a household name will generally actually be a good actor. Secondly, people recognising a member of your cast means they’re generally more likely to watch it. Finally, there’s the effect on the rest of the casting—some studios might take the opportunity to push the compensation of the “no-name” actors down because they have an opportunity to work with a star, others might go the other way and use the first star in negotiations to get additional starts signed on to the project.
So essentially, the big projects make a lot of money, and executives attribute a significant part of that generated value to having the big star involved, and so they portion the funding to ensure that happens.
There’s also the negotiation factor on long running shows, main characters end up in good negotiation positions for more money if a show is successful and their character isn’t easy to kill off. This is also why Netflix tries to cancel stuff before the 3rd season—that’s about the point who holds the power in negotiations shifts away from the studio.
An in-demand actor is a finite resource, they can only really work on one or two projects at any given time, so this also pushes their fees up as projects may end up in bidding wars. Conversely most entertainment costs very little to sell beyond the initial production costs, so after that’s broken even it’s free profit they can use for these fees.
Tl;dr capitalism
I wonder the same thing about pro sportsmen…
Spectator sports is entertainment.
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For every one making millions, there are millions making near nothing.
People at the top of every industry DO make that much. Think about the UHC guy, you don’t think he was pulling that much?
Inequality is baked in.
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People watch them.
